It’s Not Your Fault, Tubby. It’s “Climate Change.”

This morning, during a Fox News report about the supposed dangers of consuming beef, the designated “expert,” a family practice physician, cited Dr. Dean Ornish’s piece entitled “Holy Cow! What’s Good For You Is Good For Our Planet” about a recent study that claims that “beef is bad for you.” In this piece, under the heading “Global Warming Crisis,” Dr. Ornish cites an additional benefit to avoiding those yummy burgers: a decrease in your carbon footprint. You selfish American bastard, don’t you care about that? Are you more interested in eating something that tastes delicious even if you are destroying the planet? Well, since all you care about is yourself, perhaps this news will change your earth-destroying ways. From the ironically-named ScienceNordic:

This discovery made it possible to develop a precise hypothesis for how CO2 makes us fatter: We breathe more CO2, which makes our blood more acidic; this affects our brain, so we want to eat more.

In 2011, together with researchers Anders Mikael Sjödin and Arne Astrup from the University of Copenhagen, Hersoug started to test the hypothesis on humans.

At the university’s Department of Human Nutrition, they placed six young men in special climate rooms, where some of them were exposed to increased amounts of CO2. After seven hours, the men were allowed to eat as much as they liked.

This little pilot study showed that the men with the greater amount of CO2 in their blood ate six percent more food than the men who had been in climate rooms with a normal amount of CO2.
“We could also see that the extra amount of CO2 caused the men’s heartbeat to rise, and this gives us an indication that CO2 affects the brain’s nerve cells – orexins in the hypothalamus – which among other functions control our appetite and the composition of our nutrient intake,” says Hersoug.

“A very small change in the activity of these nerve cells will presumably have great importance for our development of obesity or for maintaining our weight.”

If they’re right, I guess the answer is to stop breathing, which everyone knows can result in serious weight loss.